This is the third feature from Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, and comes to the Sydney Film Festival's competition already well awarded -- it shared the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. The film opens with an austere and beautiful extended shot of the night sky slowly lightening to a sunrise and then we see a man, praying at a kitchen table in the dawn. This is Johann and his wife, Esther, leaves him to pray and breaks into sobs.

They are Mennonites, and Johann (played by Cornelio Wall) has fallen in love with Marianne. He has been open with his wife about the affair, and has brought them both enormous pain. But he and Marianne are made for each other. 'You have found your perfect woman,' his father, a preacher, counsels him. 'Not everybody achieves that. In a way, I envy you.'

With this exquisite film, Reygadas takes his time to place his characters within the landscape, to let us immerse ourselves in the emotional heartbeat. He has a very distinct sensibility and he's audacious in his use of the 360 degree pan, or an extreme longshot, where it is simply bodies we are seeing choreographed in space to create a feeling of powerful intimacy.

For example, there's a scene showing the literal heartbreak of Esther, the wife, who bolts from the car in a rain storm, and collapses.

Reygadas acknowledges his debts to Bresson in the way he works with actors; and to Carl Dreyer -- in particular Dreyer's Ordet, a film about love, death and resurrection.

But there is also an earthy sensibility here, as well as an insistence of cinematic purity. For me, the films of Reygadas -- the festival has also screened his first and second features, Japon and Battle in Heaven -- have been one of the eye-openers of the festival so far. And with Hunger, this film sets the competition bar high.